


Perfect in Every Way

by leftofrevolution



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 14:33:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4482983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leftofrevolution/pseuds/leftofrevolution
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rictus was not Joe's perfect son. But he was still Corpus's little brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfect in Every Way

Rictus’s problem, Corpus had long thought, was that he had turned out to be a disappointment. Corpus hadn’t always thought it a blessing to start as one instead--to have always known that you were not the son your father longed for--but now, in retrospect, there were benefits. Any way in which Corpus was deficient--of which there many, with physicality being so prized in the Citadel--was expected. Any way in which Corpus showed some hint of value--when his dad caught him reading a book from the old world out loud to Miss Giddy before his fourth birthday, when he noticed something was wrong with the aquifers and figured out how to fix the problem long before anyone else even noticed the lowered aqua cola pressure, when his brain proved as powerful as his body was weak--he was praised, and he could see the pride in his dad’s eyes. He was never going to be his dad’s perfect son, so there was never anywhere to go but up.

Rictus, though... Rictus had been so full of promise. He didn’t come out small and broken like Corpus, nor did his behavior start alarming and turn rapidly worse, like Corpus had heard of Scabrous--had seen of Scabrous, a little--before dad had decided that even keeping a few floors between Scabrous and his brothers (and more to the point, between Scabrous and the Wives) wasn’t far enough for safety and sent him out to second for the People Eater in Gas Town.

No, Rictus was born healthy, and big, and strong, and untwisted. Six years younger than Corpus, but already towering over him when he was little more than a babe. Never took that sickening, worrying enjoyment in hurting little things that had been the first warning sign with Scabrous, but he loved wrestling in the dust and clay with the War Pups his own age, and he came out on top more often than not, grinning at his victory. A black thumb, talented with a lance, and not complete shit behind a wheel to boot, for all he didn’t have a driver’s instinct. He was even well liked for how it never seemed to occur to him to rub it in, his strength and health and generally being the luckiest bastard in the Citadel. Fuck, even Corpus liked him. Resentment really should have been the order of the day, but it was hard to hate a little brother--and he would always been Corpus’s little brother, it didn’t matter how huge he got--who thought you were more brilliant than Einstein (though Rictus didn’t know who that was and would just say Corpus was the smartest in all the Citadel, even more than Miss Giddy), who took you up to the highest green cliffs and driving out on the dunes (the walls of the Citadel sometimes got too close, and Rictus understood that more than he understood most things), who was generally everything Scabrous should have been (but wasn’t). It got to the point that Corpus grew wistful for a world where Rictus was Joe’s perfect son in fact, instead of just in dad’s imagination. For all that he noticed Rictus’s failings long before dad, he still wished dad had been right.

But in this case, at least, Immortan Joe was wrong.

Corpus wouldn’t go so far as to call Rictus stupid, and he would make anyone else who did regret it. But… not bright. A little slow, at least. Too trusting. An easy child, who never hardened enough to be anything but… simple. And there was no spark of a leader in him; even he had been quick enough to make decisions in a situation gone suddenly to shit, he lacked both the confidence and the inclination to tell other people what to do. And these were flaws, unfortunately, that were just easy enough to dismiss that dad took far too long to accept them.

So instead of having dad’s pride in him thrive with each passing year as he grew older, as it had for Corpus, seeing some spark of affection in his eye when before there had just been indifference, Rictus got it the other way around. Immortan Joe had expected so much that anything he got would have been a disappointment. What he got was far from nothing, a son growing taller and stronger than anyone else in the Citadel, loyal, and better than most in both a fight and with his hands buried in an engine. But not the ideal heir Joe had dreamed of, the one who would lead the Citadel on to even greater glory and prosperity once Joe was gone. And so Rictus got to see what little warmth their dad had in him turn cold, his eyes harden and his gaze turn away, long before he was old enough to understand entirely why (but old enough to recognize it was some fault of his, Corpus knew).

It was only once Joe finally came to terms with Rictus as the son he was instead of the son Joe wanted him to be that some of that warmth returned, but for all Rictus welcomed it like the Wretched longed for their daily aqua cola, a little of Rictus’s trust was gone. He knew that warmth could be taken away.

For most, that probably would have turned to bitterness, to discover a father’s love to be so conditional on factors outside of one’s control, but Rictus loved their dad far above anything else, so instead he fought harder than ever to make sure he would never see that coldness again. Which was why, Corpus supposed, he was taking the news of Angharad successfully passing into her third trimester so well. None of the other Wives had made it so far in years. At least somebody was giving Joe the son he craved, even if that son wasn’t Rictus himself.

Also by that point dad had talked up Angharad’s baby so much that Rictus wanted a little brother almost as much as Joe desired his perfect son.

“D’ya think he’ll be a good driver?” Though Rictus answered himself before Corpus did. “Course he will. Furiosa can teach him, and I’ll be his lancer once he’s no longer a pup, but that’ll be ages. But he’ll be in the garage in a few years, and I can show him the engines. He’ll have his choice of cars, and we’ll make sure there’s none shinier by the time he’s ready to decorate his wheel-”

“The brat’ll probably be born crippled, if it doesn’t come out dead,” Corpus interrupted, long sick of this conversation. He was aware that some of it was jealousy; he wasn’t so eager as that to have his place as Rictus’s favorite brother ripped away by an infant. But he did actually love Rictus, in the way Joe had never quite managed for anything at least since Corpus had been born; uncomplicated and savage, which was appropriate for the Wasteland, but also honest and near unconditional, which wasn’t.

Joe had ruled the Citadel for almost forty years, and despite having his pick of the healthiest woman for all that time, he hadn’t sired a perfect son, not once. They came out dead, if they were lucky, or wrong, if they weren’t. Corpus had a sneaking suspicion that one of the Organic Mechanic’s assistants was an elder sister, if only because she was full life and un-mutated, yet no one—not even Joe—had ever touched her as far as Corpus knew, but a perfect daughter wouldn’t cut it. A perfect daughter, by Joe’s definition, was a contradiction in terms, and so he was getting old and yet had no heir. It just seemed improbable by this point that Angharad’s get would be that heir. Having Rictus’s hopes get raised so high seemed cruel, with how likely they were to be dashed. Better someone give him a dose of reality, if only to make the near-inevitable disappointment less crushing.

Corpus half-expected Rictus to call him a liar to his face, at best, if not a heretic outright; no one contradicted Joe. Except that while Joe was the Citadel’s god, even to his youngest son, Corpus should have recalled that not once in Rictus’s lifetime had Corpus ever been known to be wrong. And so instead, Rictus’s eyes widened, and his mouth parted for all nothing came out, and then he blinked, hard; the face of a true believer frozen at the sight of infallibility spitting in the eye of the Immortal.

It didn’t take more than a few seconds of Rictus’s blinking before Corpus took pity, as he wouldn’t have for anyone else. “You remember how it’s gone before. Dad is being… optimistic. He wants Angharad to bear him a son more than anything, so he’s gotten his hopes up, is all.”

That, at least, caused the confusion to fade from Rictus’s eyes, though the misery that replaced it wasn’t really any better. “I want it too. A baby brother. I could… I’d be a good big brother. I would.”

At that, Corpus could only smile, slap Rictus lightly on the cheek as what passed between them as a gesture of affection, and hope that Rictus didn’t notice that his expression was nearly as twisted as the rest of him. “I know you would.”

\--*--

Rictus never did get to prove it, but Corpus still believed it. Better than him, at any rate.

After all, when faced with the murderers of his baby brother, the killers of the person he loved most in the entire world, Rictus would have done more than sit there, quietly, and struggle to breathe.


End file.
